A mansion hidden directly under the Bay Bridge | Hacker News Reader

A mansion hidden directly under the Bay Bridge

sfgate.com

352 pointsthunderbong147 comments

FTA, $500 per day to rent an historic mansion overlooking the bay (i.e. before the bridge obstruction)

I have a family wedding to attend back east this autumn and we're looking at around that (before "service fees" and taxes) to sleep 5 out in the sticks of New Hampshire -- short-term housing has truly gotten out of hand, basically everywhere.

Yeah Airbnb has become so outrageously expensive and is so much less convenient than a hotel that it's almost never worth it anymore, it's crazy.

It's sad because AirBnB has also similarly shrunk the "suite" class of room that we as a 5 person family need. So we're forced into using AirBnB/VRBO because hotels only offer 2+2 (and most rental sites don't let you even look for 5 person rooms). Ugh.

I'm trying to book multiple(4) rooms for 9 people and most places I've searched just don't seem to support the idea of a group traveling. I don't want to call every place, I'm just trying to shop.

Sometimes, letting professionals help is the only way. They already know the places that can accommodate your party's size, and can often get very competitive rates.

Hiring this type of professional does not come at a "competitive rate"

Travel Agents tend to be free (for the traveler), what are you talking about?

Unless they are also free for the person renting out the place, wouldn't they simply raise the price by the cost of the travel agent?

Similar to apartment locators, the "agent" is often paid by a commission from the apartment rather than by the person using the service. So this is one of those cases where you are the product.

No doubt. But probably not specifically for this stay, so basically all the people who also rent this place without using a travel agent are subsidizing your use of the travel agent.

where does one find a travel agent?

I'm looking for one right now xD Using BBB and Yelp xD

Just search for 4. You're almost never going to get in trouble for sleeping 2 adults and 3 kids in a hotel room for 4.

Often you can find that they will charge $xx per additional person, if you go over the listed figure (if you choose to declare the overage).

More often they will declare >N persons a 'fire safety hazard' and refuse for your safety and security. And to help them make more revenue.

Cruise ships do this too, even if the extra person is an infant.

From personal experience, just stick the youngest on the floor

That’s outrageous. You could trip over one and sprain your ankle. We just tied ours outside and told people the kids identified as dogs.

What? Why?

The author probably intended it to be an hilarious joke, but they assumed you are as well versed in Fox News identity politics as they, sadly, are

You’re right about the first part. I don’t have Fox News so I’m not sure about the second part. I’m not particularly sad about it but thank you for your concern.

Personally, I got a good laugh out of it…

There's an active genocide going on but you just had to go there. This would have still been funny without this tired, old, cliche of a "joke"

No genocide at all. Most of our kids survived!

Kindness costs you nothing

This has been our experience

Negotiate if you’re staying for a month or more. I frequently get prices that are less than half the asking price.

You can always negotiate. When I did nomading I regularly only booked on or two days with booking and then asked for a deal for one or two more weeks if I liked the place.

At least the 15% or so fee from booking portals are easily waved. If you are off season and the hotel is empty anyway they often are happy to go even further.

Things must be different here (BC, Canada). I can't think of why I'd ever rent a hotel room when AirBnB's are usually a similar price and way more comfortable (usually).

Unless I had a worry about cancellations I suppose.

AirBnB is like the proverbial curléd girl:

When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.

This comment is Google's first hit for "curléd girl".

I don't know what that is, but it made me laugh!

I live in the US, and for most places I travel in-country, my experience is similar to yours.

There are exceptions, of course.

They are comfortable during the stay, but not when you arrive or leave and waste so much time there.

I never know if that Airbnb will have toilet paper, towels, shampoo, dishwashing liquid, etc. and for everything that they don't I have to do a supermarket trip and buy a quantity that would last 2 months when I'm staying 2 days.

Then when you leave, despite paying 20% of cleaning fees, you may be asked to do the dishes, vaccum the floor, etc.

All of that together has an extremely high cost, especially on a vacation.

In europe my experience is kind of the oposite. Airbnbs have been incrementally more expensive over the years. Thet are now as expensive as hotels, but without the quality of service.

Only times I enjoy airbnb are when I am travelling alone, don't need more than a room, and want to actually have the opportunity to chat and get tips from the host.

I have the exact opposite experience -- as someone who always wants two adjoining rooms (for kids). Doing that in a hotel tends to cost as much as 3 times what an Airbnb would cost, and the airbnb is more comfortable. You just need to actually read reviews.

Yeah what I've found with Airbnb is these days you need to optimize way harder for host quality/reviews and less for your actual preference in terms of location, price, furnishings. If the place has a 4.95, you will get what you pay for. 4.5-4.8 = there many be some hiccups. < 4.5 you might as well go to Vegas and put the money on black.

Well you have a very particular scenario, but in most cases, having to clean up everything, take the trash out, doing dishes, cleaning grill, taking linens out, collecting towels and starting the washer while still getting kicked out at 10? And paying hundreds for cleaning on top of that? You can’t enjoy the last day and you’re paying for it.

Been there, not even sure how it's legal to charge a (usually quite substantial) cleaning fee while having the guest do 1/2 the work.

In a Napoleonic legal system it might not be. Perhaps the question you should ask instead is why is it not illegal?

I must be staying in very different airbnbs than you. I have never had to do any of that. But I only stay with Superhosts and only 4.8 or higher.

I've never had to do any of that. AirBNB is way cheaper for my family of 6 (3 adults, 3 kids)

you’ve been very lucky. the list of “chores” i’ve had to do at the airbnbs i’ve stayed at is unreal. even worse when i was paying absolutely ridiculous cleaning fees.

If there's a high cleaning fee I just don't do the "chores"

I've found that level of chores to be pretty rare (and nonexistent in more recent years), and there was a push over the last year or so (from Airbnb to their hosts) to do away with much of that sort of thing. Not sure how well it worked, though. At any rate, reading through reviews usually tells you if the chores are excessive. And if it doesn't, and you end up doing more work than you'd like, you can always include that in your review. (I also noticed that nowadays many hosts advertise "no chores" in their listing description, or even listing title.)

Personally I don't mind taking out the trash and starting the dishwasher before I leave. I draw the line at doing laundry or actual cleaning, though. I'm always torn on being asked to strip the beds that we've used. On one hand... annoying... but on the other, that tells me that they won't waste water and electricity/gas cleaning stuff that doesn't need to be cleaned, which I like. Sorta in the same line as when a hotel will ask you to hang towels that you're ok with using multiple times, and leave towels you want washed on the floor or in the tub.

My assumption is that part of the reason for the excessive chores is that it's harder to turn around a property for a new guest when the cleaning crew isn't on-site. At a hotel, housekeeping just goes from room to room down the hall until they're done, and the hotel often has some amount of slack so even if housekeeping isn't completely finished, they can still check in new guests as they arrive.

At an Airbnb, the cleaning crew may not even be at the property for the entire run of a dishwasher. But I suspect the hosts that want you to do things like start laundry don't have an extra set of bedsheets and towels: in that case, screw them, they're being cheap and making you work for it.

> You can’t enjoy the last day and you’re paying for it.

You pay for nights, not days (same as a hotel). Regardless, I don't think I've ever "enjoyed" my last day in any kind of rented accommodation where the check-out time is noon or earlier. The entire morning is always about getting ready to leave.

You choose poorly, I’m afraid to say. I ask my guests to do nothing but lock the door behind them, and I don’t charge a cleaning fee.

Yeah blame me all you want but you’re an exception, not the rule. Good for you though and I hope to find more hosts like you.

AirBnB just needs to add a “no cleaning fee” search option.

I'm hearing AirBnB have for a little while now been playing fast and loose with reviews - genuine and fair negative reviews are being blocked, and it looks like this is to prevent (short-term) loss of revenue to AirBnB.

They mention this was before the Loma Prieta earthquake which was in 1989; if we take inflation from 1980 to now into account that'd be $1600-1900 today. Probably still good value, esp. given the view, but I guess it does depend on how it was furnished at the time.

New Hampshirite here: Wherever you're trying to stay, it sounds like you're doing it wrong...

Unless you're trying to be in, like, Lancaster during PorcFest or something.

Funny I had never heard about PorcFest until just now and drove by Roger's Campground less than an hour ago.

It's not that PorcFest is especially widely known. It's just that Lancaster doesn't have much in the way of inventory, and it books up for that one week, even though the event is at a campground.

you got me so excited!... till I could find no mention of pork and porcfest in the same sentence

tl;dr Porc refers to porcupines, which is their mascot for libertarians

Pardon the sidebar. What does FTA stand for? Googling the term doesn't seem to yield results that make sense to me.

From The Article, I assume.

From the article

Hotels in SF are affordable for some reason.

Well, you’re obviously not looking for abandoned navy mansions. Don’t worry, I’m not charging for this valuable tip.

I, too, choose this man's Dead Wedding.

also, interesting they had to design it not to cast a shadow on that house

""" But the decision to build an architectural icon didn't end problems - it started new ones. The most bizarre was with the U.S. Navy. In 1998, it refused to let Caltrans onto Yerba Buena Island to finish its engineering work. The Navy's issue was whether the Bridge would overshadow the one-time home of Admiral Chester Nimitz, a hero of World War II.

"We had to come up with a design where we wouldn't cast a shadow down onto that particular property," Ney explained, with the Nimitz home in the background and directly next to the new span. "We had to make sure that the bridge snugged up close enough to the existing one so that we weren't coming over the top of Admiral Nimitz' house." """

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-bay-bridge-competing-agains...

It may not cast a shadow directly on it, but the bridge still destroyed the mansion's utility.

The alternative would have been to run the new east span south of the old one, instead of north. Apparently San Francisco preferred that option, but Oakland wanted the north alignment. I'm not sure why, all I've seen mentioned so far is that they chose that particular alignment to ensure drivers would get a good view of San Francisco while driving west...

San Francisco is the only place I know with this bizarre obsession that things shouldn’t be allowed to cast shadows on other things, as a general rule.

It’s just strange.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/SF-supervisors-...

In the USA. For interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light . The second last paragraph comments on SF.

Very interesting. The concept has been soundly rejected in the US. Except for San Francisco.

How’s that working out?

I think NYC is king of sunlight regulation https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oec/technical-manual/08_Shadows_2...

I mean actually read it. It basically says shadows don’t really matter much and you barely need to worry about them and then goes on to spell out in very clear detail what happens when they do matter so there don’t have to be moronic lawsuits every time someone wants to build a low rise apartment building.

I'm not sure I understand - https://sfplanning.org/resource/shadow-analysis-procedures-a...

40 feet, times of year, 20% shadow. make a model. At the surface level, they look similar to me. NYC has been doing that for a whole lot longer, I wouldn't doubt their planning department has a more refined process. But it's not like SF is alone in this kind of regulation.

My understanding is that NYC

* has smaller time requirements for sunlight; the planning requirements state that an area should have 4-6 hours of sunlight a day, whereas SF looks at if it gets any worse over any time period

* NYC only protects specific kinds of park uses for sunlight, so like sunlight is not material for a basketball court, for example.

Not sure who you think you’re arguing with

The inclusion of a solar-study to prove adherence to shadow regulation is a standard part of most types of development applications, not just in the USA but around the world. This kind of build out is regulated for many reasons: property damage, aesthetics, health, and with a renewed focus: energy use. This includes casting shadows over one’s own property.

That’s definitely a thing in other cities.

It's a thing in Tokyo as well, leading to some interesting building shapes.

https://thetokyofilesurbandesign.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/ja...

There was a case in Oregon, I think a couple decades ago, where an Indian tribe built a longhouse in town then tried to prevent construction of any building that might cast a shadow on it. I don't remember whether they aimed at the courts or city council, or how it turned out.

We have this in Austin too. Also the capitol view corridor, an inverted system protecting sightlines to the capitol building

Why is it strange? Sunlight is an extremely valuable asset, both physically and mentally. I actually find the opposite mindset (that sunlight doesn't matter) really strange.

I mean of course it matters.

But it definitely ain’t a valuable asset, it falls on pretty much the entire planet, excepting the infinitesimally small portions that are directly next to tall buildings. Even Ireland and Seattle from time to time.

But either way, the link I posted is about San Fransciso not approving a low rise apartment because it could cast a shadow on a basketball court for a few hours A YEAR, which is, in fact, insane in an urban housing crisis context.

Those in Plato's cave don't value sunlight either.

Pretty neat that you can view the whole circumference of the house, and _almost_ read the plaque outside, in Street View:

https://goo.gl/maps/8Xc6MUhmAdKQTXbHA

It brings to mind good memories of family outings spent in former officer's housing, up in Officers Row at Fort Worden, WA. Hide & seek was a lot of fun.

They really did make that bridge as ugly as possible.

From below, I suspect most structures like that are ugly. But personally I think the new bridge span looks nicer than what it replaced. Not gonna sing its praises, but I think it's an improvement.

European here. Bridges definitely can good good also from below.

Looks like the house is in the shade of that bridge, contrary to various comments here.

Fun fact: You can reach it by bike from the east bay now, and it makes for a fun ride. Just be careful for side winds!

Fun fact: You still can't reach Treasure Island or Yerba Buena island by foot or bike from San Francisco. People living on TI are entirely dependent on Muni and private automobiles, and even then SFMTA tried to cut service to Treasure Island a few years back.

Recently a regular ferry that goes between the island and the ferry building was established. It’s a very pleasant ride and they allow you to take your bike on it.

Sure, but that doesn't really change the dynamic of having to rely on public transit or private vehicles. In addition ferries are among the most expensive modes of transit with an outsized environmental impact. Against the backdrop of the city trying to move TI from Section 8 housing to luxury condos that's even worse, IMO. Either they're going to price it out of reach of the poors or they're going to force everyone to subsidize luxury transit for the richie riches.

100% there needs to be a pedestrian+bike path to San Francisco from the island.

100%. It can double up as maintenance route which is a plus. And this would make such a nice commute option for many in Oakland/Berkeley who now just WFH on principle.

>> In 1998, the feud between the Navy, which still owned Yerba Buena Island, and Brown went public. Navy officials expressed frustration that the new eastern span would flow directly over Nimitz House and the nearby historic residences of other officers. A Navy aide called the plan “devastating.”

Not In My Immediate Territorial Zone

“Don’t build here!”

“Oh yeah? We’re the state! You and what navy will stop us?”

“We ARE the Navy!”

“Oh.”

That’s how Robert Moses’ plans for a Manhattan bridge were stopped - when FDR blocked it on national security grounds for the Navy

Cars really should be put underground. Electric cars going in tunnels, not gasoline cars spewing the exhaust from the top of the bridge.

… The mansion’s bright white siding is turning dull and black from car exhaust. …

It puts the fun into “In 2000 we’ll have flying cars” when the whole XXth century was spent building highways and ramps that were higher and higher into the air, and the whole XXIth will be spent trying to put them underground. The real futurist landscape is a city like Lyon in France, or Amsterdam, where cars are put away and we walk or bike to work.

Flying cars is a dream of baby boomers. To everyone else, this is a nightmarish scenario of unending noise and exhaust spewing from these baby boomers flying over the residential areas.

I will skip the ignorant ageat drivel, but why would there be exhaust spewing any more than any car, electric or otherwise? The noise point is fair, as passing airliners are already quite loud, and I am quite far from any airport.

Well, you wouldn’t expect a baby boomer to drive something tiny and electric, right? Traditionally it’d be a V8 engine pickup truck.

We have plenty of flying cars today thanks to our crumbling infrastructure! It's that infernal hard stop at the end that's the problem. /s

Hem-hem Tokyo Hem-hem

Most of the times I have worked in Amsterdam people did not go to work by bike or on foot. Most people came in by car, the second largest group used the train into Amsterdam and only a small part was able to walk or bike to work. Those were usually upper-management, people able to afford housing in Amsterdam and not living in the surrounding suburbs and satellite cities. For them it was still a 25 minute bike ride to the industrial estate that the office was in, so sometimes they would call an Uber to work.

Anecdotal though.

I'm all for that, if you're able to pay for it!

Sadly, boring tunnels is a teensy bit more expensive than paving roads... :(

Every bit helps. If you look at the Central Expressway (Bay Area) and compare it to Lawrence Expressway. Lawrence sits above, goes via an overpass and generates a lot of noise. Central, on the other hand had been lowered down. And lets smaller roads to pass over it. A lot less noise.

Or, you know, shift the entire building away, brick by brick, if it's historically important for the city?

It takes a decade and many billions of dollars to dig a single tunnel in most cities in this country. So best of luck with your plan..

I understand that the price of a tunnel is somewhat comparable to the bridge.

You are misinformed. Consider the engineering challenges alone.

"A frequently cited rule-of-thumb in transportation engineering is that tunnel construction costs two to three times as much as bridges, and that simple rule of thumb explains why there are so many more bridges than tunnels in operation today."

What gives you your understanding? Mine is from multiple sources at the top of Google for the query "price of tunnel versus price of bridge"

I’ve never said it was the same. Somewhat comparable. In practice bridge is likely more expensive, if you take in the externalities accumulated over the lifespan of the bridge full of cars.

Engineering costs its a matter of volume, what kind of ground you need to dig, expertise and experience. If you can get something like the Boring company up, costs would drop down.

And engineering costs don’t account for externalities of having a bridge full of noisy cars hanging there, polluting in every modality: view, noise, smell, splitting the neighborhood, reducing walkability, destroying the property value.

The bridge is literally on top of a bunch of faults. Tunnels are even more of a death trap. No thanks.

It's an interesting chicken and egg problem in America.

Have people lost the will to think big because others before them have failed, or do people assume that they will fail because they don't think big.

I guess the asset-light strategy works sometimes (a lot of cities are regretting mass transit investments post-pandemic), but it sure doesn't seem to lead to better quality of life.

Why tunnels tho? Or rather, why single occupancy vehicles in tunnels? It just feels like a public transit system with extra steps…

Because a lot of people will never want to take public transit even if it was more convenient than it is now. In the US outside of NY, Chicago, SF, and perhaps a few others public transit sucks. Even adding 5 new light rail lines isn’t going to change things in Houston when most people want suburban life and only go downtown for a sporting event or concert.

I’m not sure if your first sentence is true, but it’s an interesting idea. My gut says even the most staunchly anti-local transit folks would still gladly use public transit in a city that has a good system (e.g. if they were to visit Paris, or Tokyo, etc).

Saying people would never use transit even if it were more convenient doesn’t match the pattern of what I’ve observed actual humans do. It would be nice if there was a study on this.

Visiting vs living is very different. Everyone I worked with in Rome drove to work, but the people I worked with were admittedly of a certain group.

If an electric car is in an accident and the battery catches fire, my understanding is it is very difficult to get under control.

Something I am curious about is what will happen when we have hundreds of electric cars going through the Lincoln Tunnel? Will battery fires be better or worse than gas fires?

The numbers say EVs catch fire at a lower rate than ICE so presumably there would be fewer, although EV fires are more intense.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/a38225037/how-much-you-should-...

Turning black is almost certainly from tire dust, which electric cars also produce.

I've been living on a busy street for the first time and the amount of fine dust from car exhausts is absolutely staggering. Never again.

I think it's mostly not exhaust but the dust from the road top layer and from tires. Electric drive helps little with that.

Brake dust, too. You find it all over things near completely electric rail lines, which have no gas or tires.

Seems like the perfect place for a museum, tbh.

Could be one about WW2 actually!

There's already a significant museum in Nimitz's hometown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_the_Pacific...

I’m genuinely interested in the environmental discussion that took place during engineering that led to this decision. There are a couple of federal statutes pertaining to construction of roads on (or near) historic properties (FHWA Sec. 106 and 4f). I can’t imagine that this was an ineligible historical resource given its age and historical significance.

Even the alterations to view itself could have qualified, so I’m assuming that there were no feasible alternatives. There may also be some other nuances that the article didn’t cover, so I’m not completely certain, but it’s enough that I’m curious.

The article kept mentioning that it was the re-building of the bridge that added noise and soot and such. But... there was a Bay Bridge there before, right? That island isn't very big, so the bridge couldn't have moved that far... how is the new bridge so categorically different for the view/air/noise of this house than the old one was?

The old bridge was a couple 100 feet over, on the other side of the hill behind the house. Big difference if the freeway is behind a hill vs directly overhead. :)

It's hard to imagine that sentimental navy brass can gum up a critical roadway for over a decade -- contributing to the many-billion-dollar increase in bridge cost from the original plan.

The interplay between civilian control of the military and the military putting bases or jobs in every congressional district is dicey.

How do we fix it? Compulsory service with a peaceful election in exchange for higher education and lifelong healthcare?

NIMBYism runs deep in California.

The ads on this site are unbearable on mobile.

Brave blocks ads natively in their mobile browser, you should give them a shot.

There is a lot I don't like about Brave, but I can't fault them for having the best mobile app on market (for me).

Why not Firefox? Bad redesign release a few years back and now discernible way to change the accessibility so it holds always. Old.reddit text is too small to be read no matter what I've tried.

None of the other browsers on Android I've found to be worth the time.

Many sites are using adblocker blockers (including this one)

don’t know about Brave but μblock origin fails for this site on Firefox mobile on iOS

> don’t know about Brave but μblock origin fails for this site on Firefox mobile on iOS

uBlock Origin with Firefox on the desktop seems to work for me, though there probably are a few differences between mobile and desktop.

A lot, Firefox ( and every other browser on iOS) are effectively skins on Safari. Apple will only allow third party browsers that use WebKit on the App Store.

ublock works on kiwi browser on android for this website.

I use uBlock on Firefox Android, as well as AdAway (which functions as a DNS adblocker) and I had no problem, and no ad.

The site uses https://www.getadmiral.com/, they call it adblock recovery solution.

Firefox (and other browsers) on iOS are pretty limited in what they are allowed to do. It is quite likely Admiral is able to detect that easily compared to more robust solutions on Android.

The whole thing is a frankenbuilding but that add-on toilet on the back side is something else.

That ramp in the back was a recent development?! [0]

[0] https://www.sfcta.org/projects/i-80-east-side-ramps-project

I guess I'm listening to too much Lana Del Ray lately, because my first thought upon reading the title (all I could see above a subscription box) was of a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, far down the coast.

Car centric American infrastructure rears its ugly head once again. A once beautiful view spoiled by the concrete monstrosity

But hunderds of thousands times more useful is the bridge than the house

Public transit still needs bridges to cross bodies of water.

I'm sure there would be plenty of people who would want to live in a place like that, even with the traffic!

Very sad. Understandable, but sad.

This seems like a cool place to secretly camp.

with that proximity to San Francisco, that idea likely has already been oversubscribed

Yeah, but likely there’s some cycle of “there’s lots of guards scaring away campers so no one camps, guards get lazy and it’s empty so good for camping”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com